Montreat: The Reverend Billy Graham, the most widely heard Christian evangelist in history, died on February 21 at his home in North Carolina. He was 99.
The son of a North Carolina farmer had preached to millions in stadium events the world over he called crusades for more than 60 years. He transformed American religious life through his preaching and activism and was a counselor to presidents.
His death was confirmed by Jeremy Blume, a spokesman for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. He had dealt with a number of illnesses in his last years, including prostate cancer, hydrocephalus (a buildup of fluid in the brain) and symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
Graham spread his influence around the world, including India, through a combination of religious conviction, commanding stage presence and shrewd use of radio, television and advanced communication technologies, report agencies.
He wrote some 30 books and was among the first to use new communication technologies for religious purposes. During his “global crusade” from Puerto Rico in 1995, his sermons were translated simultaneously into 48 languages and transmitted to 185 countries by satellite.
Graham’s standing as a religious leader was unusual: Unlike the Pope or the Dalai Lama, he spoke for neither a particular church (though he was a Southern Baptist) nor a particular people.
He read from Scripture at President Richard M. Nixon’s funeral in California in 1994, offered prayers at a service in the National Cathedral for victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and, despite his failing health, traveled to New Orleans in 2006 to preach to survivors of Hurricane Katrina.
He was welcomed even by repressive leaders like Kim Il-sung of North Korea, who invited him to preach in Pyongyang’s officially sanctioned churches.
He was not without critics. Early in his career, some mainline Protestant leaders and theologians accused him of preaching a simplistic message of personal salvation that ignored the complexities of societal problems like racism and poverty.
With a warm, courtly manner that was readily apparent both to stadium crowds and to those who met him face to face, Graham could be a riveting presence. At 6-foot-2, with a handsomely rugged profile fit for Hollywood westerns, he would hold his Bible aloft and declare that Scripture offered “the answer to every human longing.”
Graham drew his essential message from the mainstream of evangelical Protestant belief. Repent of your sins, he told his listeners, accept Jesus as your Savior and be born again.
William Franklin Graham Jr. — Billy Frank to his family and friends as a boy — was born near Charlotte on Nov. 7, 1918, the first of four children of William Franklin Graham and Morrow Coffey Graham. He was descended on both sides from pre-Revolution Scottish settlers, and both his grandfathers were Confederate soldiers.
Though the Grahams were Reformed Presbyterians, and though his father insisted on daily readings of the Bible, Billy Frank was an unenthusiastic Christian. He was more interested in reading history, playing baseball and dreaming of becoming a professional ballplayer. His worldliness, his father thought, was mischievous and devilish.
It was the Rev. Mordecai Ham, an itinerant preacher from Kentucky, who was credited with “saving” Billy Graham, in the autumn of 1934, when Billy was 16. After attending Ham’s revival sessions on a Charlotte street corner several nights in a row, Billy walked up to Ham to make a “decision for Christ.”
After he graduated from high school in 1936, Graham spent the summer selling Fuller brushes door to door before spending an unhappy semester at Bob Jones College. (It is now Bob Jones University, in Greenville, S.C.) He then went to the Florida Bible Institute (now Trinity College), near Tampa.
It was there that he wrote in his 1997 autobiography, “Just as I Am,” that he felt God calling him to the ministry. The call came, he said, during a late-night walk on a golf course. “I got down on my knees at the edge of one of the greens,” he wrote. “Then I prostrated myself on the dewy turf. ‘O God,’ I sobbed, ‘if you want me to serve you, I will.’ ”
“All the surroundings stayed the same,” he continued. “No sign in the heavens. No voice from above. But in my spirit I knew I had been called to the ministry. And I knew my answer was yes.”
After graduating from the Bible Institute, Graham went to Wheaton College in Illinois, a respected evangelical college that awarded him a degree in anthropology in 1943. He met Ruth McCue Bell, a fellow student and daughter of a prominent Presbyterian missionary surgeon who had spent many years in China and married her in that year.
In the mid-1940s, Graham became the chief preacher for the Youth for Christ rallies. He helped establish the Graham Youth for Christ that held “crusades” across North America and in Britain.
Graham began taking his “Crusade for Christ” on the road. In 1957, he drew more than 2 million people to a series of rallies, extended to 16 weeks, at Madison Square Garden in New York. The crusades became international: One, in West Germany, was televised live in 10 other European countries. In 1966, he preached to nearly one million people in London.
By maintaining fiscal integrity and personal probity — he stuck to his rule never to be alone with a woman other than his wife — Graham kept himself untarnished by the kind of sex and money scandals that brought down evangelists and religious broadcasters like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart in the 1980s.
The Grahams lived on a 200-acre mountain retreat in Montreat, N.C. His wife died in 2007. He is survived by his sons, the Rev. William Franklin III and the Rev. Nelson Graham, known as Ned; three daughters, Virginia Tchividjian (known as Gigi), Anne Graham Lotz and Ruth Graham McIntyre; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.